Weekly Review

A Philadelphia man pleaded guilty to drunkenly stealing the thumb of an ancient terra-cotta warrior while at a museum’s ugly sweater party.

Moments before the opening statements of a trial to determine whether Fox News had defamed Dominion Voting Systems by airing false claims that the corporation’s voting machines flipped votes to Biden in the 2020 presidential election, that it bribed government officials, and was owned by a company founded in Venezuela that rigged elections for Hugo Chavez, the parties announced a settlement. Fox will pay Dominion $787.5 million, less than a quarter of the cash it had on hand at the end of 2022, and will not have to apologize. An 84-year-old white man whose grandson described him as “sit[ting] and watch[ing] Fox News all day every day” was released on bond after shooting a black teenager who had come to his front porch by mistake. An upstate New Yorker who barked at neighbors’ dogs was charged with murder after shooting a woman who accidentally turned into his driveway. A Texan shot two competitive cheerleaders after one of them opened his car door, thinking it was her own, and a North Carolinian shot a six-year-old and her parents after a basketball rolled into his yard. A note left behind by the perpetrator of a mass shooting at a Louisville, Kentucky, bank revealed that part of his goal was to show how easy it is for a person with serious mental illness to get a gun, and, less than a month after a mass shooting at a Christian school, Tennessee state Republicans ended their legislative session without taking action on firearms. As part of a fundraiser, Idaho Republicans auctioned off “trigger time” with Kyle Rittenhouse. “There are numerous ways to raise money,” said a spokesperson for an animal rights group criticizing a kids’ competition to hunt feral felines in New Zealand. “Sending children off to kill cats shouldn’t be one of them.”

Despite a ceasefire, fighting continued in Sudan on Eid al-Fitr. The U.K. Foreign Office evacuated staff from its embassy in Khartoum, but was criticized for failing to assist hundreds of other citizens in other parts of the country, some of whom only received auto-replies to their requests for life-or-death aid. It was reported that Russia has been unable to replace or repair the approximately 2,000 tanks damaged in its war with Ukraine because of a shortage of ball bearings, and Russia accidentally bombed one of its own cities, injuring three. “It’s not a failure … it’s a learning experience,” said a former NASA official after SpaceX’s most recent rocket exploded four minutes after its launch. An Oklahoma sheriff’s department threatened to charge those responsible for making a secret recording of the sheriff in which he talked about killing journalists and lynching black people. “Oh my God, they wrote down the racism policy,” a former Florida prosecutor recalled thinking after seeing a sign in the office dictating tougher penalties for Latinxes. Election filings revealed that Donald Trump earned less than $201 from Truth Social, and it was reported that the National Archives had deleted a photo from a publication commemorating Trump’s presidency because Trump’s lips were too close to a child’s mouth. A toddler who breached the White House fence was reunited with his parents by the Secret Service. James Bond, a 60-year-old Sheffield man, was reported to have triggered an armed response when he entered an office building with a BB gun strapped to his belt. “It’s not loaded,” said Bond. “It’s for symbolism.”

New York City’s only rest stop for deliverypersons closed, and it was reported that after a DoorDash driver was in a car accident and rushed to the hospital, the company asked his wife if she would complete his delivery. The CEO of a technology company praised a worker for selling his dog because of the organization’s return-to-the-office policy, then allegedly fired him after receiving bad publicity. The CEO of an office furniture company apologized after telling workers who asked about staying motivated not to live in “pity city.” A former Vinton Township, Ohio, fiscal officer was sentenced after misusing public funds to purchase hot tubs, a drum set, a gazebo, a snow cone machine, telescopes, and a wildebeest. It was reported that, probably due to deforestation, male hellbender salamanders are increasingly eating their young, and in Texas, six cattle were found dead with their tongues missing. A Philadelphia man pleaded guilty to drunkenly stealing the thumb of an ancient terra-cotta warrior while at a museum’s ugly sweater party, and a Welshman whose dog nearly chewed his toe off without the man noticing learned that blocked arteries in his foot were causing numbness. “It feels good,” said the victim of a botched assassination and identity theft attempt in response to the 21-year sentence of her former friend, who gave her poisoned cheesecake. It was reported that a hearse driver who nearly drove over a cliff said that he was saved by the weight of the dead body he was carrying, and a woman whose husband died while on a cruise accused the ship operators of storing his body in the beverage cooler rather than the morgue. Lin Hui, a Chinese panda who was famously shown videos of panda intercourse in an effort to get her to mate, passed away at age 21, and psychologists found that watching pornography makes both men and women more willing to have sex with a robot. Researchers announced a device that will allow people to control computers with their tongues. —Jon Edelman

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